Marcia A. Murphy - To Loose the Bonds of Injustice: The Plight of the Mentally Ill and What the Church Can Do

I am a Christian who has lived the life of a mental patient in the United States during the period between the closures of the big institutions in the 1950 s and the advent of community care-based treatments. My new book, To Loose the Bonds of Injustice, is an inside view of the deplorable conditions faced by people who experience mental illness and the vital role the church and society must play to counteract those conditions.

This book builds upon the insights provided in my earlier memoir, Voices in the Rain: Meaning in Psychosis, in which I shared my story of what it was like to have a psychosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, and clinical depression. I described my experience with mental illness through which I found spiritual meaning and, ultimately, God. Please refer back to Voices in the Rain for information on my experience of psychiatric disability and the importance of religious faith in the recovery process.

As I am in a stable condition it would be very easy to simply sit back and relax, letting the box fan cool me in a luxurious indifference as I sip my iced tea, blocking out from my memory the drama of my adult life as well as how it is for the vast majority of people with psychiatric disabilities, many of whom are struggling to survive and are on the streets.

To Loose the Bonds of Injustice is my initiative to inform and educate others about social justice issues of mental health. I share my experiences, reflections, observations and interpretations. Instead of an academic look from the outside, this is an inside view of someone who has a lot to say about the issues that prevent people who have a mental illness from living full and productive lives.

Efforts at reform go back several centuries. In the 1800 s Dorothea Dix led a movement to release mentally ill people unjustly held in jails and alms houses or who were homeless, and instigated the building of large mental institutions. These institutions, however, only resulted in warehousing the ill under deplorable conditions without any treatments providedlargely, because no treatments were available.

Conditions worsened over the next half century, even as conscientious objectors were given the opportunity during the world wars to work in mental institutions rather than be deployed for combat. One such objector, Frank L. Wright, Jr., provided eye witness accounts of the deprivation and suffering within institutional walls:

In my heart were thousands of mental patients and their families, many of whom I had come to know personally, whose anguish and bafflement knew no bounds. And in my mind were the millions of Americans who know so little, and therefore care so little, about those forgotten thousands who are in our mental hospitals.

Such inhumane conditions, combined with doctors who thought the patients as less than human, led to the point that they created barbaric procedures to remove the frontal lobes of their patients brains. The proceduresgraphically depicted in the 2008 film, The Lobotomist were performed in at least fifty state asylums often without patients consent or foreknowledge. The results were devastating. Such abuse was legitimized by the medical industry, championed by Walter Freeman, a neurologist, until it became public knowledge and an outcry against it halted such actions. Freeman was decried a moral monster